Construction begins on new Prep building in Danvers

Thursday

Apr 10, 2014 at 12:00 PM

By Jeff Popejpope@wickedlcoal.comAnyone who travels along Spring Street will begin to see the steel girders of St. Johnís Preparatory Schoolís new academic building begin to rise from the ground in the coming months.While the actual site preparation began a couple of weeks ago, the Prep celebrated the ground-breaking for its new academic building on Thursday, April 3.The foundations will be poured in a couple of weeks, with the first steel girders in place by the start of school in September, according to Steve Cunningham, the assistant head of schools for facilities. The building is scheduled to be completed and ready for use in September 2015.The new building, which is expected to cost $22.1 million, will be five stories with 30 classrooms."Our new facility is going to contribute greatly to preparing our students to engage well in their undergraduate studies," said Headmaster Edward Hardiman. "It will really prepare many of them for professional responsibility and jobs that probably donít even exist yet."In addition to the classrooms, the new building will include 12 science labs, two computer science labs, a robotics lab, a fabrications lab, the schoolís administrative offices, school counseling offices, school nurseís office, a large lobby that can be used for assemblies, faculty offices and meeting spaces and a terrace off the back that will also be used for gatherings.The new building, which will be located on Spring Street, adjacent to the Ryken Center for the Arts, will have a brick exterior that complements the Flemish-Gothic architectural style of Xavier Hall, located across the street. The building was designed by Flansburgh Architects of Boston and will be constructed by Windover Construction of Manchester.Hardiman and Principal Keith Crowley stressed that the new building was designed to focus on multi-disciplinary education, which they say promotes collaboration and conversation."For us, what is really important about this building Ö is it is really going to help us to shift some of how we do things educationally to foster more collaboration, to foster a greater degree of innovation," said Hardiman."The facility has a lot of spaces designed for collaboration," added Hardiman. "They are designed for conversation, they are designed for fostering relationships between teachers and students, student to student, which, I think, when you look at Xaverian education, those are really essential things."Crowley said that with the new building, the Prep wanted to create an interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary approach to learning.As an example of this approach to learning, Hardiman noted that the site for the new building included a grotto dedicated in 1918 for two members of the Class of 1916 who were killed in World War I."Fine art students and religious studies students are collaborating (to design the new grotto)," said Hardiman, "with our landscape architects and contractors. This is real life practical training for our students.""We are looking for where there is curricula overlap and looking to develop more curricula overlap to re-enforce skills and content," Crowley said. "How can we focus on the essential learning skills that included creativity, innovation, the idea of entrepreneurship, and some of the long-term traditional ones, critical reading, critical writing, looking at analysis and research."The new building will house the science, computer science, mathematics and world languages departments, departments that are spread out over three buildings now.While the focus of the classes in the new building will be the sciences, Hardiman said the Prep is not shifting its focus."We have been an arts and sciences and humanities school since we are established," said Hardiman. "We are going to stay a humanities school."The Prep, which is located at the intersection of Spring and Summer streets in Danvers, is a Catholic, Xaverian Brothers-sponsored secondary school for young men. The tuition for St. Johnís for next year will be $20,550, Hardiman said.Four pillarsHardiman explained that the new academic building was the first of four pillars that the school was focusing on as part of its Prep 20/20 plan.The second part of the plan is the construction of a new facility for wellness on campus."We are in the process of raising some funds for that building at this point in time," Hardiman said.The wellness building, which would include exercise and workout facilities, will be located next to the Cronin Memorial Stadium.Hardiman said the third pillar was "substantial growth of our endowment."Hardiman said that money would be used "to increase access for a diverse group of students here at St. Johnís, and to fund faculty professional learning."Middle schoolThe fourth part of the plan is to expand St. Johnís Prep to include the middle school grades of 6, 7 and 8. This will occur when the new academic building opens up in September 2015.Classes that are now at Brother Benjamin Hall, which includes science, English and social studies departments, will be moved to the new building and Xavier Hall.That will leave Brother Benjamin Hall, which was built in 1964 and renovated in 2003, as the middle school.Cunningham said changes to Brother Benjamin Hall would include converting teacher offices into a cafeteria and a library/digital commons. A recess area and bus drop-off area would also be created for the middle school."All classroom spaces and the labs remain as is," said Cunningham, who said the work, which will cost about $1.8 million, will be done this summer and next summer.With the inclusion of a cafeteria in Brother Benjamin Hall, the middle school students would not have to cross Summer Street often, a concern that was raised by neighbors and town officials when the plan was first unveiled."The only time, (the students) would really be leaving that building is to use the gym," Hardiman said. "They would be highly supervised. They wouldnít be roaming the campus."The tuition cost for the middle school has not been set but will probably be about 80 to 90 percent of the high school tuition, or about $17,000 to $18,000, according to Hardiman.